creating text-searchable documents from scanning

I understand that you can now use Acrobat 8 (standard and professional) to
create searchable text in scanned documents and it seems that you can do the
same with Capture; since they both include OCR software.

Is this true for all of these programs, and which should we use, and why have
two programs that do the same thing? I think right now we have Acrobat 7, or
maybe even 6.

This is very confusing.

Acrobat has had OCR for years, long before the Capture program
appeared. Capture is the industrial strength "big brother", with
watched folders and the like.

Capture supports multiple machines (load-balancing), dictionaries, zoning,
manual interventions including multiple stage text cleanup, font adjustment, and
other production and workflow features.

Acrobat (since version 4? 5?) includes basic image-to-text conversion, with
minimal editing features.

The choice is Acrobat, if you are making and manipulating PDF files, and have
occasional needs for text extracts from image files; or Capture, if you have a
need to turn large quantities (thousands to millions) of pages of paper - or
existing images - into reliable and accurate text (extent of reliability and
accuracy depend on the effort and resources applied).

Noah,

This sounds like Capture is what I want - but I need to be very sure about a
detail for my project. When I OCR things using Acrobat it doesn't do a great job
with font matching.. in fact, for what I am doing, it messes it up pretty badly.
Does Capture do this better? A lot better, somewhat better, no much better?

Thanks.

Thanks all for info about both products and their features. It sounds like for
most of my work, Acrobat will be just fine.

I also found out that our copiers at work can scan documents and saves as PDF
files, and it has an OCR function, so most "clean" documents (with
normal fonts like Arial and Times New Roman) can be saved as text, as opposed to
a picture of the text. It sort of does what picture capture in Acrobat does.